Andy H.

I read some books:

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Sarah Monette, The Mirador
Laurie J. Marks, Fire Logic
Pamela Dean, The Secret Country (reread)
Pamela Dean, The Hidden Land (reread)
Pamela Dean, The Whim of the Dragon (reread)
Emma Bull, Territory

(Also Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water; I can't decide if I think that qualifies as a novel for the purposes of this project.)

Today it snowed all over everything; I didn't have to consider whether school was going to stay open, because it ended yesterday, aside from the five or so term papers I have to write in the next two weeks (also, it's Saturday). I should write one of those papers every day or two so that I can be done all the rest by next Friday, and then spend a week on the relatively enormous Honours essay. I finished the first one today (having properly commenced it yesterday), so maybe it's possible.

I took my dog out briefly, and when we came back in he lay himself down on the rug in the front hallway and carefully licked all of the snowflakes out of his fur.

Stubbornly, there is some.

William Gibson, Spook Country
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream
Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword

This batch highlights what is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in my method with these posts, or at least it will if a particular regular commenter asks about the book that I expect them to, because I read that book way back at the beginning of the month, and now my impressions are much vaguer than they were at the time. I can probably find something to say, though.

Coming home from UBC, I took the 99 to Broadway [edit: Broadway and Granville, that is] and then the 17 downtown (which isn't as weird as it might seem, since the 99 is fast enough that I caught a significantly earlier 17 than I would have if I'd taken it from school in the first place). On the 17 I sat next to a slim black woman in her forties; on her other side, sitting forward, instead of sideways like us, because he was at the very back of the bus, was a young asian man with 80s rock star hair, and on our way downtown the two of them had a conversation. These are only excerpts, as filtered through my imperfect recollection.

He was from China; he had been here in Vancouver about a month. She had been here for seventeen years, but he didn't hear her say so, because he was carrying on one of his own thoughts from before at the same time. He had recently graduated from high school, and was here, apparently, preparing to go to UBC.

"Do you like your country?" she asked. "What?" "Do you... Do you like China? Is China good?" "Oh. Yes!" "Ha ha, that's good. Are you -- " "China is cool!"

"How long have you been here?" he said, because he had not heard her before. "Oh, a long time," she said. "Twenty years?" "No, no. Seventeen years!" "Ahh. Where are you from?" "Ethiopia." "Ethi...?" "Ethiopia. East Africa. You know, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt..." "Ahh. Ethiopia. Like, in the Olympics!" "Yes, yes, that's right." "Africa." "Yes. Not West Africa, though! That's, that's Africa. Afro-America. No. I am from East Africa."

She was happy to be living here; she thought that he would like it, too. "It is nice here. Very, very beautiful. Friendly. Peace, peace, lots of peace." "The prisons are nice," he said. Prisons? Was he making fun of her? "Eh?" "The prisons are nice." But she took it in stride. "Yes, yes. Peace everywhere. It is good. Not so much of that war and fighting. In East Africa, Ethiopia sometimes, phwoo, oh my God!"

"Do you believe in Jesus?" "No," he said. "No? What do you believe in?" "I am... Not religious." "No? Oh my God, oh my God!" she laughed. "So you are just like, woo!" and she made an expansive gesture with her arms, as though indicating a person scattering in all directions. "Yes, that is me." "Here, here, I have something for you." She opened her purse, and removed some little cards with religious scenes printed on them. He took a couple. "Ah. Jesus," he said, cautiously identifying the main figure in the picture. "Yes. These are for you. Keep them with you. The story on the back of that one is very nice. It's good. Keep them in your purse."

"I like Korean food," she said. "You like Korean food?" he repeated. "Yes, I like Korean food, and Japan food. Chinese food, I have never tried that. No one ever takes me to it! But many of my friends are Korean." "I really like Japanese food," he said. "You do? I like it, too. I would like to try Chinese food. I hear that it is very hot. I like that." "Yes, I like Japanese food. But I love my country!"

Apparently a list of the books most often marked unread by people who own them on LibraryThing; after the fashion of the other people who've done this (I spotted it at yhlee and truepenny), bold means that I've read it, italics that I started to but couldn't finish it, and strikethrough that I particularly disliked it.

( Obscured for length. )

Unsurprising things that we can deduce from this exercise:

• I haven't read many of these at all, although in my defense (?) I also don't own many of them. (The 'owned but not got around to' subsection of the list seems to consist entirely of Mrs. Dalloway and Gravity's Rainbow.)
  
• If it's SF, I am significantly more likely to have read it than if it's otherwise, and
  
• If I started it, and it doesn't use quotation marks when people are talking, I wasn't able to finish it.

Of the books that I did read, the ones I was assigned for school were Brave New World and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I devoted a bunch of my August leisure to video games, so I haven't been reading as much as I might have. No doubt this trend will continue for different reasons as I fall on into a morass of schoolwork.

Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor
Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch
Sean Stewart, Resurrection Man

School began Tuesday and continues; today I had my first class that wasn't that class' initial introduction. (For Social and Political Philosophy; we watched a video on the Milgram experiments with the shocking.) The campus is much busier and yet somehow more organized than it was in the summer; somehow the effect of the vast tides of people surging between buildings past signs and booths and shouting isn't anarchic, but fractal, every piece of it presumably making cheerful sense if you look closer. On the first day, there were people with shirts saying 'I am UBC' holding signs and leading around huddled groups of first-year students; the signs apparently just had to be distinctive, and I saw a lot of people with seemingly random words: "Somatic", "Endemic", "Bourgeoi$". I also saw five or six different people I knew from Langara, which was unexpected and heartening, as all the Langara people I'd kept in touch with have stayed there (hi, Marilee and Allison); most notably, Goldie, from my introductory Metaphysics class in 2006, is in the Social and Political class, and we hung out for some time measured in hours afterward.

The main things going on in my home are preparations for my sister to move out (for, yes, the second time); this time she is going to Fort St. John, which is considerably farther away as well as being, by my family's standards, almost bewilderingly small and inconveniently located as technical cities go. ("It's not that it's in the middle of nowhere; it's just that it's nowhere near anywhere else.") She is going there because she has been offered a job at their local newspaper, the Alaska Highway News, which suits her very well on account of how she's a newspaper reporter with an adventurous streak. So there has been a lot of putting things in boxes, and we bought a new car (a startling shade of red; so far my mother won't let anyone else touch it or get inside) because Tess is getting the old Volvo, and attitudes are generally a harried sort of excited.

I am playing in Rachel's online AD&D campaign on Saturdays. I rolled somebody who could have been a paladin even if we were playing 2nd edition*, so a paladin is what I'm playing, which is neat because I've always kind of wanted to try it. It's very different from being the wizard I played last campaign, who was always making pragmatic moral compromises; that was fun and interesting not least because of the way it often made me the player kind of uncomfortable, but it's a very different sort of gratifying to play someone who speaks up when something seems wrong, and won't kill someone who isn't facing him with a sword in his hand and won't allow the torture of prisoners, etc.

(* We're playing 3.5, which I seem to be getting used to; I still think they made some unfortunate decisions in the Player's Handbook, and that a lot of the character classes feel less special than they used to, but some 2nd edition rules are starting to have the same startling quaintness for me that 1st edition does. It's a little bit sad.)

The sun is starting to learn again to be comfortable. I always liked autumn and spring the best.

The second annual International Blog Against Racism Week has just ended (on Sunday, but this took me a little while); all the links to formal participants are being collected at ibarw, but there is (awesomely) a truly daunting number of them. Personally I've dealt with the influx by mostly keeping my reading to the places I lurk anyway, so I thought that I would link to some of the posts I've seen that struck me idiosyncratically the most, for the benefit of other people who might otherwise have been overwhelmed.

oyceter has a basic definitions post that should probably go first and be read before anything else here by somebody new to these discussions, as well as this post on anger (cf. truepenny on metaphors for voice) and this one on the rhetorical fallacy of bringing up racism in Japan as a counter to discussions of white privilege (plus bonus interesting history of colonialism).

coffeeandink's "Four Cabs" (which, again for possibly idiosyncratic personal reasons (though it's also very well-written), I found especially affecting); she also has roundups of pertinent web recommendations and book recommendations, as well as this post on why she participates in the Week.

She also earlier posted this compact explanation of the shocking stuff going on right now in Jena, Louisiana, with links to more information and ways to help. I linked Rachel (masamage) to that post, and she wrote a column about it for her school newspaper where she's a columnist, even though the last time she wrote about racism a bunch of people yelled at her and made her frightened of doing it again (I am proud).

While I'm linking my friends, Hannah who is synchcola has a brief amusing analysis of tokenism in the US government as related to Star Trek.

elisem has this post about jokes, and a couple of followups in response to one of the comments.

And yhlee on the idea of 'virtual integration', as well as posts on race and teaching, race and writing, and being asked where one is "from".

Another pertinent yhlee post, somewhat predating the Week proper, is this one containing some excerpts from a book called By The Color Of Our Skin. ( Some stuff spinning off in reaction to that one. )

I'm pretty nervous about thinking and talking about this stuff in public; due to lack of practise, I'm probably not very good at it. But it seems worth trying to do anyway, even if I get here a little late.

A lot of rhetorical time seems to be spent emphasizing the insufficiency of language -- that there aren't words for the most important things, that actions speak louder, et cetera. Every once in a while, though, usually in some way to do with my dog, I'm reminded of the obvious fact that language is way better at communication than anything else we have; it's either necessary or a huge timesaver in getting across emotional subtleties, complex abstracts, and organized plans requiring the cooperation of other individuals than the speaker, and without it we'd be a lot more alone. Hooray for language!

Today, a fortune cookie told me, "Your reputation for honesty will bring rewards," and the first thing I thought was, "Oh, good, I have a reputation for honesty." Then I remembered that I had read this in a fortune cookie rather than had it said by someone who actually knew who I was. That's how fortune-telling gets you, I guess, ricocheting off your hopes and expectations.

I have been listening to Leonard Richardson's new album a lot. (Long-time readers, of whom there are very few, may remember that Leonard's example is a large part of the reason I first started having a weblog.) It's like a more focussed version of what first drew me to his older stuff: extremely low-fi, nerdily esoteric, and surprisingly affecting.

Rachel and Heath came and stayed for (at least parts each of) five days (this is the power of trains -- in reverse!), during which we got what for us is not much sleep at all. We saw lots of people, including _Quinn, and all sans-David of the erstwhile B5 group, and Elise and Marilee, and Rachel's livejournalfriend Nicole; we ate at three different restaurants I am fond of, and omelets at my dad's house, and fish and chips my mother made, and my apple crisp; we climbed the VPL and looked down; we played video games and board games and Rachel and I stayed up late talking nearly every night. It was the first time she's properly visited me, though she's been through the city briefly a couple of times and of course I've often stayed down there, and it was a different sort of wonderful than I expected; I thought it would seem special and exciting, but instead it felt very natural, looking at Rachel together with the things and places I know, like it made perfect unremarkable sense that she would be here instead of a nine-hour journey away.

I did, in fact, finish all my essays on time, and on Monday we went out and, after some confusion, dropped the last two off at UBC. As such, I'm done with school until September; I guess I'd better figure out what I'm doing with the rest of the summer.

The other day I noticed that each of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles corresponds in personality (though not in bandana colour) with one of the four houses at Hogwarts. Leonardo is a brave and forthright leader; Donatello is scholarly and creative; Michelangelo is laid-back, humble and friendly; and Raphael is cunning and cynical. I wonder if anybody has written this fanfic yet?

A year or two ago, the principals in my late & lamented AD&D group were sitting around idly pursuing some worldbuilding tangent or other, and we came up with the idea for this powerful undead wizard with a peculiar gap in his knowledge and memory -- he doesn't know how it was he died, or who was responsible for bringing him back as he is. Eventually, by some magical means, he travels back in time to find out, and of course it turns out that he ends up in a situation where he himself is the one who grants his corpse its fell animation.

Then he says, "I know where I came from... But where did all you non-zombies come from?"

I got kind of distracted from books toward the end of the month.

C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Shon'jir
C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kutath
Sarah Monette, The Virtu
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Ian McDonald, Sacrifice of Fools
Linda Nagata, Memory

Sacrifice of Fools was written in 1996, and set, if I recall correctly, in 2001; one of the little future-projection worldbuilding details is that there is now a King Charles on the British throne. Especially since the death of the last Pope, I've been a little more aware of my pleasure in the stability of Elizabeth's still being Queen; there has been no other face on Canadian coins for well more than twice my lifetime. (One of the neat things about having a living person on one's currency is that the portrait of the Queen ages, depending when the coin was issued. It's so hard to imagine someone else on our money that I've occasionally supposed aloud that once she is dead we will just have her continue to age, a zombie Queen Elizabeth slowly decomposing until, long after most people have forgotten why, every coin is stamped with a grinning, regal skull.)

School starts Monday. I don't quite feel ready.